The missionary Daniel Everett went to the Amazon to convert a remote tribe to Christianity, and he was instead deconverted to atheism :)

Apparently their language and thinking was very literal and concepts like talking to dead people didn't make sense to them. You talk to Jesus? But he's dead! I don't remember the details, but I was wondering about how much language constructs consciousness. He wrote a book Don't Sleep, there are Snakes about it.

I recently found a poem of mine that I'd lost. It's not particularly about atheism, but here it is since it seems true to me:

Penny, bright fay of Somerset

spread her wings like a butterfly

Winging twixt heaven and hell

Visiting with many colors the flowers

(rivers, souls and lives)

of the earth where in dark wonder

heaven's mixt with hell.

She was someone I was corresponding with online, and she'd called me "Princess of Ithaca", I suppose because there's a "Prince of Ithaca" in Troilus and Cressida. So I wrote a poem to her calling her the "bright fay of Somerset". I thought I'd accidentally thrown the poem away and I was so glad to find it again.

Daniel Everett's book has a dramatic statement about the Piraha tribe's language & its influence on their thinking. And one wonders reading it whether language creates certain kinds of abstractions, like reifying Goodness or Time into a being called God; and perhaps excludes other abstractions like ordering ratios between quantities by putting them on a line.

I was wondering about it because of the statement in another discussion that people weren't skeptical before a certain time. Such ideas are interesting but hard to prove. Especially when people were burned alive for certain ideas, it's hard to know if people didn't even think certain things, or they just kept their thoughts to themselves. So I was wondering about how much language influences thoughts, or terrorizing repression by the state or church influences thoughts. Free speech is important partly because if people can't speak certain things, they may not even think them.

And is there an analog to this in the right that - according to me at least - people have over their own bodies, that if you can't control what goes on with your own body and what you put into it, that it takes away ... ? A sense of self perhaps?

In George Orwell's 1984, there's a dictatorship that seeks to take away the freedom even to think "politically incorrect" things, like criticism of the state, by changing the language and simplifying and limiting it, as well as a lot of intimidation. They seek to stay in power forever by doing this. So one wonders whether this could actually work.

English is supposed to be a very rich language, I've heard - concepts from many different cultures. One theory was that the Pirahas were culturally traumatized because too much change happened too fast, so that robbed them of abstractions.

Maybe I'm just no good at navigating forums but I could not find the poem's author listed anywhere. It's by Tim Minchin. He is an absolute genius. And that is not a term I use casually. If you like this, look for him on youtube. You will be blown away. Look for "The pope song" or "the good book". Much harder to find (because he is currently touring with it and it keeps getting taken down) is "thank you god", possible the greatest song I've ever heard. In fact I was just listening to it again today. Cheers, all!